On February 10th there will be a critical annual and special meeting of Creo’s shareholders, when the plan put forward by a group of dissident shareholders (predominantly investment firms Goodwood Inc. and Burton Capital Management, LLC) to replace the Board of Creo will be voted upon. At this time, the dissidents have disclosed neither their director nominees nor any specific plans for Creo, including the implementation of radical cost cuts they proposed in an August 2004 letter to the company. The board of directors of Creo in an announcement on January 10 has recommended that shareholders vote in favor of the Creo slate of director nominees and reject any slate of director nominees that may be proposed by the group of dissident shareholders. These dissidents have indicated their intention to nominate a slate of directors who would in turn appoint Robert G. Burton, Sr. as Creo's chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors.

In the past I am known to have written articles on more than one occasion that have been critical of Creo and its management and marketing strategies. Most recently I was the first person outside of the financial community to have drawn attention to the degree of dissent about the management of Creo within certain areas of the financial community and within a section of Creo’s shareholder community. It may therefore come as a surprise that this article is all about why at all costs the group of dissidents must be stopped from succeeding, and in putting Robert Burton and his associates in charge of the company.

I recently wrote an article for The Seybold Report in which I analyzed Creo’s product line to identify which products may be suitable for disposal if Creo were to be taken over and broken up to release revenue to return to the shareholders. In this I came to the conclusion that there were few areas of the company’s business that could logically be disposed of. The ones I identified were the Spire digital front-end business for digital printing; the digital imaging business of color scanners, imaging software and digital camera backs; and the evolving digital plate business. It is unlikely that there would be a great financial return for any of these businesses as none of them are the leaders in their market areas, and there would be few likely buyers. In fact in the plate business, the most likely buyers would be one of the ‘big three’ plate suppliers who would most likely buy the Creo business to eliminate a serious competitor.